prosa inofensiva

It takes a whole six hours to read the whole Summer Fiction issue of the New Yorker, from Amsterdam to Greenland. Every story in it, every article, note and cartoon. In high school I had a friend, Liliana, she used to tell me her dad loved to read the newspaper before breakfast. He reads the whole paper back to back, she bragged. I told her it is impossible for anyone to read the entire newspaper, every single article of it, every morning. Well, my dad does, she replied and that was sort of the end of it. I didn’t have a father and I didn’t read the paper, not enough elements to argue.

In class I used to draw tattoos on Liliana’s hand with a ballpoint pen. We didn’t know anything about henna tattoos back then. Not even Madonna knew about henna tattoos back then. Dad, Liliana is a hippie!! Her brother would scream at her tattooed hands and her Lenny Kravitz blasting out of a cassette player.

I went to a Lenny Kravitz concert once. He walked on the crowd like he was walking on water. Luca, an Italian sort of boyfriend I had went with me. We met at a Sonic Youth concert in the Fillmore Theater. He mistook them for Semisonic and was very disappointed. Play something else, he screamed. Something else? Thurston Moore replied laughing and then played the first riffs of Jumping Jack Flash. I told Luca I was moving to Rome to meet my father: be careful, he said. I never understood why. He gave me his phone number.

It took me a couple of weeks to call him back. Finalmente! He said in Italian when I did. We were basically concert buddies. We saw a horrible Beastie Boys Concert in Oakland. We went to see Garbage in Berkeley. I had a girlfriend who also liked girls, he confessed with disgust while the opening band (Girls against Boys, I think) was on. You’re not into girls, are you? He asked. I said no. I also wasn’t into him, but I didn’t say it.

Liliana got married then she had kids. Recently her husband wanted to take her to Japan. She didn’t want to. I don’t feel like it, she said. Her brother no longer thinks she’s a hippie, I imagine. Don’t be silly, go, you will regret it otherwise, I told her. Last month she sent me an e-mail from Tokyo. You were right! –was the subject. Attached was a picture of her and two sumo wrestlers.

I used to love outbound flights. I looked forward to ten to twelve hours of reading, watching movies and eating. I thought of them as days off. I would think: what would I be doing if I was home for the day, and then do so in the plane. Spaces and other restrictions considered. Now I dread them. I am conscious of every half and hour left before I get home. Eleven.

It takes two hours and a half to browse through a free copy of every newspaper in a language I can read. From Greenland to Miami. My theory has proven right after all these years: you can’t read an entire newspaper but you can browse through several. I have now the authority to argue it. Maybe I will send Liliana an e-mail.